Ethan White and Morgan Ernest's blog for discussing issues and ideas related to ecology and academia.

Experimental ecology is dead, long live experimental ecology!

I read a handful of experimental ecology papers the other day. I liked some of them and didn’t like some of them. It wasn’t that there was anything inherently wrong with the ones I didn’t like, they just didn’t fit in with my world view.

P.S. I was going to let this one go until Ecotone used the original post to question “the reality (or not) of macroecology as its own discipline.” There’s nothing wrong with creative titles (we enjoy them here at Jabberwocky), but when contrasted with EEB & Flow’s other posts from ESA it’s not surprising that Ecotone took this as being a passive agressive critique of the state of the field. My main concern is that EEB & Flow seems to conflate an important methodological approach with particular interpretations of ecological process resulting from an application of that approach. Just because I disagree with a particular paper using an experiment doesn’t lead me to have “an unsure feeling about this field.” I mean really.